I love me some Tim Hudson

Now that we’re in the midst of the baseball offseason and the Winter Meetings are still a week away, pure baseball news will be a little harder to come by for a while. With that, I thought it would be a good time to do something that I’ve been asked to do by fellow bloggers and readers for a while now, but have been reluctant to do so.

My post a couple weeks ago in response to the Bob McClure Q&A posted at FanGraphs generated a fair amount of positive attention, but also some criticism. Which is to be expected. I received more than a few emails (look for those in a future KoK Mailbag, because I think it’s important to give both sides of this argument about pitching) in which it was pretty clear that I’m not explaining my side very well. I’ll try to do better.

So as a way to better explain things, to give a different perspective, and to get a little (or a lot) more in depth about pitching, I’ll be talking with some old colleagues about their philosophies and breaking down some of the Royals players individually, as we see them. Read more…

It's good!

But, can we sell that? Doing good in the world is not a lost concept, as two of my students have recently shown… fight the power!

Good news.

Well, good news to me, anyway. Two of my students made the news this week and they have something interesting in common.

Andria Enns was profiled in the Independence Examiner for her next adventure spreading the ideas of peace journalism in the world. I take no credit for this, by the way. She was inspired by my colleague Steven Youngblood to pursue this concept. He took her to Uganda a summer ago and, she says, changed her life.

I have to be honest here and admit I’m not completely comfortable with the principles of peace journalism. How can you not be comfortable with an effort for peace, you say? Well, that’s the problem. Read more…

Not these Free Agents

It all started a little over a week ago when I wrote that I thought it would be a good idea for the Royals to go after Roy Oswalt during this offseason free agent frenzy. Not really speaking (writing?) from a place of knowledge, but more from “hey, why the heck not?”, I was shocked when Tuesday on Twitter it was being reported that the Royals were set to talk with the agent that represented both C.J. Wilson, and Roy Oswalt.

That started the floods gates (with reason) of Royals fans and bloggers alike with hearts all a-flutter that maybe, just maybe, Dayton Moore was actually going to take a run at the veteran right-hander. Then, a little later on Tuesday, the second bomb dropped, and it was reported that the Royals had interest in Mark Buehrle.

Now, the true level of interest could be nothing more than Dayton Moore doing his due diligence, and doing what every responsible GM should, and just testing the waters of a couple veteran pitchers that would both be sure upgrades to a under-talented starting rotation.
But, that hasn’t stopped everyone from dreaming a dream and picturing one – if not both – in a Royals uniform next year.

At KoK, Michael Engel said that the Royals should sign both pitchers and lays out pretty clearly why, and then Brett Christie wrote that the Royals aren’t done acquiring arms yet, though isn’t so sure Oswalt would be the one. So, in the spirit of debate (we will have a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome style rumble to settle this) I’m going to write something that I didn’t think was possible for me to write: the Royals shouldn’t sign either guy. Read more…

Grrrrr.

I really hate to do this, but I’m going to take Joe Posnanski to task.

Joe wrote a good column at Sport Illustrated after the Penn State child rape scandal broke, but it isn’t good enough. I came to it through a couple of links — the last in the Pitch — and all along the way it is being hearlded as one of his best pieces of work. It isn’t.

Baseball, as a business, has started to get it. Over the past decade after the publicizing of Moneyball, statistics and the search for the objective center have been forced more to the forefront of the industry ideology. Organizations have embraced the intelligent, the educated, into their offices to make decisions based more heavily on logic and information, than gut feelings and luck. Some of the “old school” ways of doing things still exist, as they do have a place in front offices, but a better balance has been struck.

Unfortunately for baseball however, that enlightenment to newer ideas and strategies and ideals has yet to filter down into the coaching ranks, where the same rhetoric and intolerance of new theories and training continues to blanket the industry.
On Wednesday, at personal-favorite baseball website FanGraphs, a Q&A with former Royals pitching coach Bob McClure was posted. It was an interesting read, getting the opinions of a former major league pitching coach, if you’ve never watched an in-game interview or read the same canned quotes in a beat writers postgame write-up.

McClure has some good tidbits about Tim Collins’ deception and how to teach it, the arm angles of Jeff Niemann and Tim Lincecum, and his thoughts on how to connect with young pitchers. All perfectly harmless statements, and really nothing that anyone hasn’t heard or read before, but noteworthy enough that an ex-pitching coach is the one actually saying them.

And then, he talks about Brian Bannister.

Let’s ignore for a second the fact that in one instance he’s praising a pitcher (with probably similar talents to Bannister in Randy Jones) for being able to “pitch at the knees”* and sink the ball in order to make it tougher for hitters to square it up, and dismissing Bannister in the next for trying to improve his sinker to do the same thing. Read more…